text:
UnScripts:ER Alternate Episodes
This script art a part of
The UnScripts Project
Your personal Shakspearian folio of humor, love, woe and other silly emotions.
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Season 8: Episode 1 - Four Corners[edit]
At the Morbidity and Mortality Conference...
GREENE: Autopsy also revealed injuries to the spleen and superior mesenteric artery. Cause of death...exsanguination from multiple vascular injuries.
ZAGERBY: Why wasn't lidocaine given for stable v-tach?
GREENE: I didn't have the ACLS drug box with me.
ANSPAUGH: When transferring a critical patient?
GREENE: The trauma nurse ran out to get it, but then the doors closed unexpectedly.
ANSPAUGH: Leaving you alone with the patient?
GREENE: Yes. I don't know if it would have changed the outcome.
CORDAY: I'm sorry, did you say the original dysrhythmia was stable v-tach?
GREENE: Yes.
CORDAY: He had a pulse?
GREENE: That's correct.
CORDAY: So the patient was conscious?
GREENE: Yes.
CORDAY: Didn't realize that.
ANSPAUGH: Do you have anything to add, Dr. Carter?
CARTER: Well, there is a way we could find out for sure...
ANSPAUGH: How do you mean?
CARTER: After the attacks, hospital security had them install cameras in all the elevators. There should be a tape somewhere.
GREENE: Carter...(as if in shock)
WEAVER: (getting up) Yes, Dr. Carter is right. I'll have security bring it upstairs. Carter! Set up the projector. (leaves the room)
CARTER: (eagerly) Yes, ma'am! (leaves the room to find the projector)
ANSPAUGH: Well! We should have this all sorted out by lunch. Let's take a brief recess.
The doctors file out of the conference room, leaving Dr. Greene, who is silently banging his head on the podium.
Season 1 Episode 21 - House of Cards[edit]
Wendy enters Curtain Area 2 and sees Med student Deb Chen hovering over a patient...
WENDY: Deb?
Chen is inserting a central line in her junkie patient.
CHEN: Almost done...there!
WENDY: Are you crazy? You're not allowed to do a central line!
CHEN: I was just gonna get it started but then it seemed so easy...
WENDY: You'll get in trouble, I'll get fired.
CHEN: I suppose you're right. Better get someone...get Dr. Swift - he's new, and he won't be such a hardass.
WENDY: (looking horrified) I'll be right back!
Wendy leaves briefly, then returns with Dr. Swift.
SWIFT: Alright, give me the bullet.
WENDY: She was doing a central line...
CHEN: (interrupting) Dr. Swift, my junkie patient needed a central line. I started, but I thought it best that you look at it.
SWIFT: OK, let's see what we got here. Good, the line's in. That's half the battle.
Now all you have to do is remove the guidewire. Gentle does it. Easy....
Chen carefully removes the guidewire.
SWIFT: See? You can do it.
Dr. Benton enters the room.
BENTON: I call it luck.
SWIFT: Yeah? Where I come from there's no such thing as luck.
BENTON: Well. Good work, Miss Chen. Hemicolectomy, six a.m. sharp. Don't be late.
Dr. Benton leaves the room.
SWIFT: I see Benton's found himself a new pet!
Wendy stamps her foot in frustration and leaves the room with Dr. Swift. Chen smiles broadly, and leaves the junkie to sleep it off.
Season 8 Episode 11 - Beyond Repair[edit]
Joyce opens the door for Abby and lets her into the building...
JOYCE: You from Chicago?
ABBY: For a while now, yeah.
JOYCE: Originally?
ABBY: Minnesota. You?
JOYCE: Idaho. The potato part, not the white supremacist part. You want a beer?
ABBY: No thanks.
JOYCE: C'mon! Have a seat, you look like you've had a long day.
ABBY: No, really, I'm fine.
JOYCE: Suit yourself.
ABBY: What's that?
JOYCE: Oh that. Somebody left a perfectly good roller skate outside.
ABBY: Where's the other one?
JOYCE: We only need one, silly.
Brian appears at the top of the stairs. The women are startled as they get up from the stairs.
He moves down slowly, hurling epithets at Joyce.
BRIAN: You bitch! That's my beer!
Brian stumbles and falls down the stairs. He lies motionless at the bottom step.
JOYCE: Oh my God! Brian!
ABBY: Joyce, call 911.
JOYCE: Brian! Brian!
ABBY: Joyce, now!
Joyce goes upstairs to her apartment to call for help.
Abby feels for a pulse, and checks to see if Brian is breathing.
Season 4 Episode 21 - Suffer The Little Children[edit]
Doug and Carol are performing an ultra rapid detox procedure on a baby, when the monitor starts beeping...
ROSS: Pulse Ox 89.
CAROL: What's going on?
ROSS: Decreased breath sounds on the left...
CAROL: Maybe it's a collapsed lung. Should I get a portable x-ray?
ROSS: No, it can't be...the pressures aren't that high. I'm giving a hundred percent oxygen. Could be a mucus plug.
CAROL: I'll get a suction catheter...
Carol leaves the room.
Out in the hallway, Dr. Greene is writing on a chart for patient Pablo the Homeless Guy, assisted by Jeanie Boulet...
GREENE: Looks good. Infected abrasion...
JEANIE: Right here...
PABLO: She cleans up good, huh?
JEANIE: I'll change the dressings when you come in to see Haleh.
PABLO: Sure. On Thursday!
Dr. Greene gets up and starts to walk down the hall when he hears a monitor beeping. He opens the door to the room and draws the curtain...
ROSS: It's the secretions. OK, hook up the vent.
CAROL: Pulse Ox 98.
GREENE: What the hell is this?
ROSS: I can explain this to you. This boy is my patient...
GREENE: Ketamine drip? What are you doing in here?
ROSS: I'm doing an ultrarapid detox. Everything's under control.
GREENE: Like hell it is! You didn't even lock the door...
Doug and Carol look at each other. Mark pokes his head out into the hallway and looks around. He closes the door and locks it.
GREENE: Kerry's not around. We gotta get this kid up to the PICU. Do you have his chart?
ROSS: I wrote something down...
GREENE: Great Doug. Now we have to falsify a chart too.
CAROL: What are you so worried about? You're gonna die of a brain tumor anyway.
GREENE: Oh yeah. OK, gimme a chart, I'll sign it. The hell with Kerry.
ROSS: That's the spirit! (aside to Carol) Hey Carol, Mark's got a tumor?
CAROL: Uh huh.
ROSS: Well that explains why his head's a few pounds heavier...
GREENE: What was that, Doug?
ROSS: Uh...nothing. Mush!
The three leave the room with the baby and head for the elevator.
Season 9 Episode 10 - Hindsight[edit]
Luka is leaving the hospital for the night, with Harkins hot on his heels...
HARKINS: Luka! Hey, um...can we get some coffee or something? Doctor Lewis said I should go.
KOVAC: I need some sleep.
HARKINS: Yeah, but I could use the company and thought you might too.
KOVAC: I'm sorry about in the elevator.
HARKINS: It's OK. It's a crappy day.
KOVAC: Maybe I gave you the wrong idea last night.
HARKINS: Not at all. Look, can I get a ride?
KOVAC: No, I can't take you home. I'm hung over, been messing up all day, and I probably won't be any good in bed.
HARKINS: Good in bed? (she asks incredulously.)
KOVAC: I see how you look at me in the trauma room. I know you want me.
HARKINS: Yeah, right! Just because you're tall and good looking doesn't mean I'm going to jump into bed with you.
KOVAC: (mocking) Really? Is that so?
HARKINS: Yeah! I'm not that 300 dollar an hour hooker you've been seeing!
He pauses, as if stunned, then regains his composure with a smirk...
KOVAC: How do you know that?
HARKINS: She's my cousin. We talk on the phone - all the time. She tells me everything.
KOVAC: (sounding interested) Really! What's her name? I never got to find out...
HARKINS: Levitra. We're like peas in a pod.
KOVAC: Well then you can take your peas to the subway, because you're not riding with Luka. Good night.
Luka gets in his car and drives away, leaving Harkins standing there holding a bag of frozen peas.
KOVAC: Hey! Who turned out the lights?!
(sound of crash)
Season 11 Episode 19 - Ruby Redux[edit]
Carter is explaining the risks of surgery to Mr. Rubadoux...
RUBADOUX: You lied to me! And I believed you! My Silvie, my Silvie. She was really something.
Carter pulls up a stool and sits down
CARTER: Mister Rubadoux, what you have wrong with you, aortic stenosis, can oftentimes be corrected with surgery. But that doesn't mean that that's the right thing for you to do. You're eighty five years old, you have chronic respiratory problems. The chances of you coming through the surgery and getting back to the shape that you're in right now...pretty slim. If you go ahead with it, there is a good chance that you will never leave this hospital again. You'll be connected to a ventilator, and you will live out the remainder of your life in the intensive care unit. Now, without the surgery, it's true you're not going to get any better. But, I believe that you will leave this hospital under your own power, and you will have more time with the people that you love. You will have more time...being the person that you are today. And yes...ten years ago I lied to you about your wife. But I am not lying to you right now.
Rubadoux stares at Carter, waiting for him to flinch...
CARTER: Okay, you got me. I'm just teasing you, Mister Rubadoux! Sure, of course you can have the surgery. You're good to go. You just have to sign some paperwork...
RUBADOUX: Wow! You really mean it?
Carter hands Mr. Rubadoux a clipboard.
CARTER: Sign...right...there...great! Thank you. Someone will be here in a few minutes to take you up to the surgical floor.
RUBADOUX: Bless you, doctor Carter! I knew you had the goods! Bless you!
CARTER: De nada! Good luck, Mister Rubadoux.
RUBADOUX Call me Ruby!
ABBY: Not as many people as I expected. None, actually.
CARTER: Well, Ruby didn't have many friends.
ABBY: Must have been his sparkling personality...
CARTER: I'm disappointed your brother didn't show up.
Abby stares at him incredulously. Then, Carter recognizes someone struggling with a walker in the distance. She is coming toward Abby and Carter...
SILVIE: (sounding winded) At least I made it!
CARTER: Silvie! What are you doing here? I thought you'd died!
ABBY: Oh...my...God...
CARTER: Mrs. Rubadoux, this is my friend Abby Lockhart. Abby, meet Silvie Rubadoux.
ABBY: A pleasure.
CARTER: So, what brings you to this neck of the woods?
SILVIE: I decided the least I could do was attend my husband's funeral. After a few decades with that man, I had to resort to desperate measures. So I faked my own death. It was the only way to get away from him! Every day, it was My Silvie this, and My Silvie that... My name's Helen, not Silvie! I just couldn't take it anymore!
CARTER: You and me both! Shall we?
SILVIE: Oh yes, we shall!
Silvie takes Carter's arm, and the three slowly make their way out of the cemetery.
Season 15 Episode 21 - I Feel Good[edit]
Brenner is writing on the board when he hears Neela's voice...
CHUNY: Neela's showing us her office.
GATES: Simon's here.
NEELA: Hey there! This is my new home.
BRENNER: That's impressive!
NEELA: Oh, check this out... (She pulls off her ID badge and shows it to the camera. It says LORENTZ MEDICAL CENTER)
GATES: Wow! Assistant Professor of Surgery!
NEELA: We get residents from Tulane, so I do have a faculty position.
BRENNER: Well, I'll be sure to tell Dubenko...
RAY: I brought the stuff you wanted from home. Who're you talking to?
NEELA: County.
RAY: Yeah? Hey guys. He peers into the camera
CHUNY: Hi Ray!
GATES: Ray!
NEELA: Um...I'm gonna be late for the OR. I just wanted to check in.
FRANK: Call anytime.
CHUNY: Yeah, we miss you.
BRENNER: Take care.
NEELA: Bye!
RAY: Looks like I win! Frank, show him the door prize...
BRENNER: (Under his breath) Paraplegic git!
RAY: Aussie pedophile...
BRENNER: Cretin...
RAY: Ass face...
NEELA: So Gates, are we still on for next week?
Everyone looks at Gates, who is eating a sandwich
GATES: (Seeing that everyone's staring at him) What?!


text:
CRM is sometimes described as the place where all your customer data resides. That's a nice image — all that helpful data, chilling in its own hangout. That data works for you, though — if you're just storing it, it isn't doing you any good.
That's why it's important to think about what you want to do with and learn from that data. We talk a lot about what we want to do with data: We want to give sales people additional tools in their arsenals; we want to track service interactions; we want to identify the most profitable customers so we can redouble efforts to keep them loyal; and so on.
We talk a lot less about what we should be learning from customer data — and that's because that takes some imagination.
Digging in the Wrong Place?
Marketing automation vendors have taken a step toward that in their own limited realm: If an offer gets a great response from potential customers, create more offers like it. What types of approaches generate responses to calls to action? How many contacts does it take before a customer takes a desired activity?
These are similar ideas to what you could be looking for in your customer and lead data, and responses to marketing and ongoing engagement efforts should certainly be part of the mix. However, there are other details buried in the data. It's like an archaeological dig — if you're not aware that something is important, you may discard it while looking for something else.
First decide what you want to learn. Most of this will be retrospective in nature, since it's based on data you've already collected.
For example, is there a sequence of events that is common between customers you've lost that led to their departure? Perhaps their response to nurturing messages dropped off just before they left. If that's the case, that behavior may be an alert to you to reach out in a more personal way to reengage with them.
Is there a pattern of customers leaving after they've contacted your support staff — or a pattern of departures after a price increase and a service issue? If so, it may be a good practice to review service processes and beef up service staff training before any price increases are announced.
The Golden Path
It's not all bad news to be discovered. You can do the same analysis for customers who turn into repeat buyers. What pattern of activity and interaction did they exhibit before returning to buy from you? Did they register for a webinar or white paper? Did they call service and have a problem resolved? Did the sales rep working with them do anything unique to foster the relationship? Did all or some of these things happen in sequence? And is there something you're trying that didn't have an impact on any of your closed sales?
On the sales side, is there a pathway through your content that pays off an inordinate amount of the time in a closed sale? If you can identify it, your sales team can help steer potential customers down that path.
These are all pretty simple examples. The really revealing use of data comes when you can make correlations between activities that happened in multiple touchpoints throughout your company. These are hard to understand, because we've always kept the data siloed — which is what CRM is supposed to remedy.
The tough part in all of this is that what works best can't be dictated by you. Your customers will tell you what they prefer by their actions and their responses to your actions. Your role is to pay close enough attention to the data to see what those customer responses are, and to use that information to replicate what works and to fix what doesn't work.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Hi Archinect!
Co-live-blogging tonight with Drew Harry from MIT Media Lab. Full house in (half) Piper!
From the GSD website:
Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the dean and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at the Harvard GSD. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics. He curated the exhibition "Nicholas Hawksmoor; Methodical Imaginings" at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. In the Life of Cities (2012) andInstigations (2012) are among his most recent publications. Nicholas Negroponte, a member of the MIT faculty since 1966, is a pioneer in computer-aided design. He is a co-founder of the Media Lab, opened in 1985, and founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child, a non-profit association that distributes technology to children around the world. In the private sector, he has helped provide start-up funds to more than 40 companies, including Wired magazine. His book Being Digital (1995), has been translated into more than 40 languages.
[Note: If you're interested in these topics, please also see the related conference at MIT, Nov 21-21, 2013, called FUTURES PAST: Design and the Machine, organized by a great team of students together with Nicholas Negroponte, George Stiny, and Terry Knight.]
6:35pm: Dean Mohsen Mostafavi takes the podium. MM: "Today, people constantly use the word "visionary" and "pioneer." In academia, people ask you about "vision" multiple times a day. But it's apt to use the word "visionary" in the case of Nicholas Negroponte, as someone who has had transformative ideas and projects, in terms of architecture, computers, and the interface with humans--pioneering the relation between computers and architecture but always inserting the human."
MM: His book, The Architecture Machine, had a tiny subtitle, Towards a More Human Environment, was published soon after he graduated. Each and every computer was becoming a part of you, becoming a part of you body.
[It is a VERY tiny subtitle.]
In the follow-up book, the Soft Architecture Machine, argues for the importance of understanding the makings of intelligence and the making of architecture, and the value of this understanding. Without this, the future of architecture could become very gloomy. Computers could add responsiveness. The possibility for a human to live in a build environment that is responsive to their needs. As against the idea of using computers to serve, Negroponte was interested in the singular goal of making the built environment responsive to me and to you as individuals, a right as important as the right to good education.
Has this promise been fulfilled? Can we speak of this close interaction between computers, humans, and the environment? Of course it is important that Nicholas went on in the 1980s to become one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab. Then in the most recent ten years, there has been some shift in focus from the relationship of architecture, computers, and humans, to the freedom that is offered through the availability of computers to a much wider group of people by creating this project--the One Laptop Per Child project.
Nicholas Negroponte takes the podium.
NN: When I went to architecture school, I had a professor that said "What you lack in talent, you make up for in gall."
LC: Negroponte went to architecture school?! Did I know that?
NN: Part of my career was to be in the right place in the right time, and I didn't necessarily have to worry about whether someone thought I was wrong or stupid, and that was a badge of honor and I could prove them wrong.
When I was in high school, I had done pretty well in math, and I won the art prizes. I decided what I should do was go to architecture school. And again, maybe an illustration of gall, I went to see the headmaster and told him this.
I told him I decided I'd study architecture because I did well in math and in art. And he said "you know, I like grey suits, and I like pinstripe suits, but I hate grey pinstripe suits." But that went over my head and I went to architecture school, which was wonderful! But it took me a while to figure out that the intersection of those two fields wasn't necessarily architecture--it was computers.
In architecture school, what I learned was not to solve problems but to ask questions. And when I look at my colleagues at MIT in engineering, they think of themselves as problem solvers. They use the world problem solving interchangeably with design.
I'm going to take you through a quick lifetime: I went to MIT as a freshman in 1961. Before affirmative action, it was a rather incestuous institution where you were a student, then went on to become faculty. Habitat was built in 1967, and as students we were all moving cubes around. Moshe Safdie was an influence for all of us.
So my first computer program looked like it came from this era--and remember, this was backed up by a multi-million dollar computer that was larger than this room.
And we built robotic devices that built Habitat-looking structures, and put it in a museum and filled the glass box with gerbils! The theory--really pretty lame--but the idea was that as the gerbils move the blocks, it was intentional. And the robotic arm would pick up the blocks and put them in certain locations and you could return to the museum and the blocks would be in different places. It was well reviewed and got some praise, but then we got into some trouble. It turned out that the robotic arm's magnetic part would sometimes get a gerbil stuck in it. A gerbil is a flexible thing, so it'd run off and be okay. And we did this all with impunity.
On to 1977: It took about five or six years at least for me to build up a lab that we called the architecture machine group, after the book. And it started to do things that were a little less frivolous. One of them was to build something called a "media room." Which looks a little old fashioned, but for the first time ever, it was a space you could where all the computing … it had quadrophonic sound, seamless floor to ceiling displays, probably a couple of million dollars of hardware running the room.
What we developed, it was the first display that didn't just have graphics, but it had images. If you wanted the calculator you touched it. If you wanted the calendar, you touched the calendar. And people thought it was ridiculous. People argued againt touch sensitive displays because you would dirty the displays. and I would say, no, in some cases you would clean it.
LC: like the gerbils-robot relationship.
NN: But most importantly, it was spatial. It was a spatial data management system. I would ask "How often did you say to your assistant, 'go into my office and look at the paper on the third shelf on the left?'" People do remember things pretty well spatially, and that was the idea here.
NN: We had these video discs that stored the video in concentric rings, and you could randomly access them. Since it was controllable down to the frame, you could build an interface around it. So here it was a sitcom where you could interface with it and not just change language and go forward and background, but things that were unheard of. The geometry of the disks was such that you could actually video--in this case we chose Aspen because you can go down the streets and make every turn--sound familiar?
LC: Drew, I guess all this is a well-trodden history for you?
DH: Yep. This is all founding Media lab history. We still talk about these original projects. The Aspen project is one that has the most modern resonance. It's interesting to try to understand why some of these projects have clear modern analogs and some seem totally lost.
NN: You had two video discs, and you're driving down the street. When you get to an intersection, you could go left or right. And it was seamless because we filmed the video forwards and backwards and you could run it either way.
NN: When you take somebody into the lab and show them an image you can touch or that can say things--you could noticeably hear people sucking in air…[it was a big deal.]
NN: You could say "Put that, there" and people were awestruck. It was so visual and so easy to come and just spend a few minutes. The then president of MIT, whose office was nearby …he was the last president of MIT to have a chauffeur. It was really convenient for him to bring guests by the lab and show this to them, and then take them off to lunch. I got to know him really well.
NN: I got to know him well, and when he got ready to retire, he said "I'm not going to become chairman, but I want to go back to the lab and do research again. But there isn't a lab for me." And I said "I'll build one for you!"
7:00 pm: NN: A touch sensitive display that also picks up pressure, not just pressure into the screen, but there is enough friction to pick up forces on the screen. That still hasn't picked up, but touch certainly has.
By this time, we decide to build the Media Lab. At MIT, if you want to start a lab, you have to build a building. Partly because everyone wars over space, and if you have your own building you don't have to do that. The faculty in the first media lab had one thing in common. They didn't all come from architecture, but they all came from departments that didn't want them. It was really a salon de refusés. I remember going to see the then-provost of MIT and saying "I'd like to include Seymour Papert in the new media lab" and the provost said "Bless your heart!" Very creative people are not the easiest to manage, and so a lot of the people who joined the Media Lab were affiliated with all sorts of schools. Many came out of architecture and planning because we hosted the arts, and that was our first venture.
We opened our doors for business in 1985. Steve Jobs was our kick-off feature. You won't believe this, but our caterer was Martha Stewart. She wanted the job so badly, she hadn't quite hit the radar yet. It was quite the opening!
It eventually grew to 500 people if you include everyone. What it had in common was that they didn't have to raise money--I did that. They didn't have to teach. I begged them, "just do your research, design, and do whatever you want to do, and the students will come in and be a part of it." It changed over time, but it worked. From the institute's point of view, we were not just the golden egg, but the goose. I was never on campus as I was always out fundraising. I was out and Michael Douglas was in my class, and he asked if I could show him around--and I could hear a student asking: "who is that with Michael Douglas?"
So I was sending checks back to the institution and not getting in people's way. They were doing perfectly fine stuff, and it didn't matter if my cover story matched. If they came to the lab, they didn't compare what I said to what they saw. They just saw a lot of passion and lots of enthusiasm. They said "Where does it come from? Why don't my kids have that? Why doesn't my staff have that?"
We ran out of space and built the second building.
The building got going when the economy started to tank, which didn't work out quite as planned. It's next door to the original Media Lab. As soon as we took this step, things started to change. Not just economically, but they changed partly because I'd been there so long.
The change wasn't just that I should get out of the way, but also that it was my turn. I had been mailing checks back and I didn't have a pet project or a group--and I said "it's kind of my turn." So my work became One Laptop per Child. So in 2001, this project started in a village in Cambodia. It was pretty remote for a long time - you couldn't get there without someone in front of you checking for land mines.
I looked at this picture of kids in the village with laptops and asked myself, what about this picture won't happen with normal market forces? I ask myself every morning if what I'm working on would happen as a result of normal market forces or not? And if it will happen anyway, I don't need to work on it.
But the laptop, that seemed like something that wouldn't happen normally. So we started the One Laptop Per Child project. It started with enough momentum--we raised $30M dollars to do this in a few days. It was a few phone calls.
LC: That must be nice.
NN: People just queued up to be behind it in the beginning. The idea was sufficiently outrageous that you could build a $100 laptop, and that it could just wind up and be connected and do all these things.
We never actually go to $100, but we got pretty close. It launched and it became a huge project--a $1B project. This was different than the scale of the Media Lab, different from a lot of things. I had no idea when it started, that it would be that important.
I don't show this picture just to gloat that I launched with Kofi Annan--but to show that by being a non-profit, you could partner with people who otherwise couldn't. And that was a very important decision: Every single friend of mine, all over the place, said "Nicholas, make it a profit making company and make tons of money and then give the money away." And I said "no, that doesn't sound right. Suddenly mission and market get confused, and I have a lot of trouble with the whole idea that there is a middle group of entrepreneurial do-good business." I'm not so sure that exists.
The real test for this laptop was not the $100, or the total count, but: Does it get into the permanent collection of MOMA?
LC: Is he serious?
DH: Yes. At least in this audience. I doubt he says that to the governments that bought them.
NN: In Uruguay, every single child between 5 and 18 has this little green laptop. History hasn't borne itself out yet in terms of economic outputs. But to me, the most heartwarming part of it is the number of kids teaching their parents how to read and write. You're reversing the format, with kids become the agents of change. They're not receptacles.
I mean, look at this kid! You've got to wonder what her life will be like, concentrating with that expression. And you can't see it here, but her baby brother is behind her, also watching the screen.
This is in India. The way the teacher was used to teaching, the kids were lined up in perfect rows and the kids were silent. And if you didn't give the right answer, you got a little fly swat or a whip, so there was no upside to answering a question. So there was a certain monotony; everyone was inert. But this is how he taught after the laptops came. This changed his view of what teaching was. He says "I have never enjoyed teaching so much. The kids come running to school now."
In Uruguay, the president announced that every child would get a laptop in 18 months. One teacher said she couldn't deal with it, and went to ask for early retirement. During her waiting period of three weeks, the laptops arrived--and sure enough, she saw the energy and went running back to the office to ask for late retirement. She assigned a project on cows. A student went home and told her parents that she didn't have an angle on cows, and her father said, "you're very lucky, because our cow tonight is giving birth." The laptops have cameras, and she could stay up and video the cow being born. As you can imagine, the result was spellbinding.
What was important was that she was not a particular good student in the past, but there was the self-esteem of everyone paying attention to her, and she became a great student. And the students uploaded it to YouTube, and by now time 100,000 people have looked at it.
LC: So OLPC introduced a modern western approach of indulging children?
DH: Hah, yeah, not clear what her agency in all this was. But maybe we really do need those little successes to see the value in education?
LC: Maybe so.
NN: We always underestimate what children can do. It turns out there are 50-100M kids that don't go to school because there isn't a school. So if there isn't a school, you have no choice. What do you do if there isn't a school? And the only thing you can do is leverage the children.
LC: Ooh, he's coming up on his current project!!
DH: Can't wait!
NN: So that's why we started two new experiments: Could you drop off tablets in a village with no instructions and no people who know about them? Just leave them there; will the kids figure it out?
The answer is yes, they will. Within about two and a half minutes the first one was open, the on-off switch was discovered. These villages don't have electricity or television or phones or anything that has an on-off switch. This whole concept is alien. But they figured it out. The kid on the right assigned himself the role of the teacher.
LC: I gotta give it to him, this is a pretty amazing story…Though someone stayed behind to take these pictures, right?
NN: These tablets are recording every touch, taking pictures, recording everything. For those of you who are IRB sensitive, this is all IRB cleared and done according to scientific principles and morality--but the kids were being tracked. After five days, the kids were using 50 apps a day. After [a bit more time], they were singing "A, B, C." After six months, they hacked Android.
DH: I've heard this 'hacked android' quote before. I've heard it was more like turning a camera on, which had been disabled accidentally. I don't think it has anything to do with code, per se. Hard to say what it really meant.
NN: This led to the X Prize. It turns out that people spend 40x the value of the prize in order to win the prize. So the prize is $15M and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to multiply that by 40.
NN: Thank you very much!
[Applause. MM and NN sit down.]
MM: Nicholas, thank you very much. I just want to go back a little to the beginning, as you went very quickly through the first part: the books, the architecture machine group. The book was written when you were just two years out of school, but it's a very confident tone in both books. How did you discover your voice and what you wanted to do as a body of research?
NN: There's such a risk in applying hindsight, of saying "I really thought about this as clearly as it sounded." What was indisputable was that the studio training, the studio experience of design mapped perfectly into where computers were starting to go. They were suddenly things you could connect to. They were becoming more affordable. Since that era was happening, to do everything in a very tangible way was very natural. And to write books while it was happening, or before it happened. I felt I had to. The confidence was probably more genetic than it was real. I made up a lot of things as I went and some of them turned out to be true. Some people asked "how did you predict the future?" But I didn't, I just extrapolated from what people were doing.
MM: But there's a particular flavor to those books. You're using art material and are bringing machines where the use isn't quite clear, together with art, which suggests that there's a poetic project--and the role of the human and the participatory. It wasn't quite like that with a lot of people who were using computers.
NN: I'd like to say yes--
MM: So say yes--
NN: Some of it was, how many people in computers could hang out with Andy Warhol? How many people in computers had Bucky Fuller as a professor? You make that list of people who affected my life and had nothing to do with computers. I became more comfortable with writing, much later. These were very tortured books. They were belabored, I don't crack them open now. They weren't naturally flowing books. But I was one of the founders of Wired Magazine and I was the first person to finance it and decided I would protect my investment by writing the back page.
LC: What?! Now I understand why Wired loves the Media Lab so.
DH: Yeah, the lab really evolved with Wired as its imagined audience. We got an email every month announcing the drop-off of a giant stack of Wired magazines. Though that audience has been devoured by the internet, which has made for some turbulent times for both Wired and the Lab.
NN: And suddenly, there I did get a voice. And did enjoy it. It was a bully pulpit. People were suddenly answering my phone calls. Writing suddenly became more natural for me.
MM: And what about architecture? When you got the chance to commission the building--
NN: I'll tell you a story about the history of that building. IM Pei is an extraordinary person, you've surely--
MM: He's a graduate of this school.
NN: He's a graduate of MIT too--of both.
MM: He did his Master's here. [laughter]
NN: He designed an extraordinary building. It actually fit the description of what something might be called the Media Lab. But when the first cost estimates came in, they were too high. I was part of the client team and we went down with the campus architect to new york, to tell IM Pei the building was too important. And the campus architect made the mistake of trying to lecture IM Pei about the ratio of surface area and volume. IM Pei got redder and redder and finally he said "I know the most efficient building would be a sphere. And so finally he said "I'll give you a box, will you let me cut some corners out of it?" And that's what we got. The design was done in a fit of pique.
MM: And then you commissioned another GSD graduate, for the second building. [laughter]
NN: Well the Gehry building and Maki building were being designed at the same time. The guy in charge of the Gehry building I would exchange notes. He would go to client meetings with Gehry and tell him to calm down. In my meetings, we told Maki to liven up as he kept drawing cubes.
We went to Japan to talk to Maki about livening up, and he threw his crumpled napkin on the table and said, "this is a Frank Gehry." He said his building would be a Gehry building inside out. [i.e. that it would be staid on the outside and explosive on the inside.]
MM: When you started the Media Lab, you didn't actually want it to last as a long time, as it was supposed to be a short-term exercise or project. What was that about?
NN: It turns out--I didn't know before this evening that we were both influenced by Gordon Pask--but I thought that the lab should be more like cybernetics then like electrical engineering.
Many things spun out of cybernetics. It didn't necessarily last that many years but it was very generative and so much came of it. But it didn't last, it didn't enshrine itself in a department like electrical engineering when it grew out of physics. But it's almost harder to end institutions than start them. So that's that.
MM: How did you establish any kind of method of evaluating the outcome of the work? You were off raising money, and how did you know if the stuff coming out was any good?
NN: You've probably run tenure cases. While people might not say this the way I'm about to say it, but let's face it, you get tenure because of fame. If the world knows about and talks about what you're doing, that's the measure. Not just because it was in the New York Times or on TV, but was the world talking about it? It's not perfect, because fame can be fleeting or penetrating--but that was the rule of thumb. And if money keeps flowing in, somebody thinks it's interesting.
And remember, nobody was funding the Media Lab to do something in particular--it was discretionary research where the funders had no control over what was being done. So those were my metrics. They sound superficial and maybe they are, but history has been a bit on my side in that things have spun out of it.
MM: If you had to start the Media Lab today, what would you do differently?
NN: Certain things happen because of where things coincide in history, and this was so locked into that era and the people. We just hired a new director a couple of years ago who is so different than any of us were--he was 44 when we hired him, a 44 year old Japanese dropout who was Timothy Leary's godson. What more could you ask for? But his world is bottom up, and immersed in social media, different than the one of the founders. So today, the Media Lab wouldn't be as elitist.
MM: Don't you think that things like the definition of the building, the fact that the resources to run an operation like that have to be quite substantial. That they sometimes prevent the kind of freedom or ease of doing things that you had at the beginning. That it de facto institutionalizes the nature of research.
NN: Yes, it does institutionalize it. There are certain hazards. Some come from the demographics of it. When we started it, everyone involved was over 60 or under 40. I was 39. What happens is that 30 years later, guess where that block is. You have different demographics, a different dynamic today than we did 25 years ago. But I'm not sure it would happen today in any way that looks or feels like what the Media Lab looks or feels like. I think back at that period and also one has to keep in mind that nobody else was doing anything else that even looked like it. But now a lot of people do things that look like it. To be a pioneer is to enjoy a certain license that you lose as more and more people start to do what you do. You want that. But then you need to go off and do something else, something edgy and different. It's sort of unacademic; you tell faculty at some point that you should go off and do something else.
7:47 pm: Dean Mohsen opens the floor for questions.
Q: How do you decide which X Prizes you want to support?
NN: I'm only involved with one, the learning X prize. There have been about five historically. There are 3 or 4 more cooking. The historical ones have largely been related to outer space. Or one going on right now, the moon lander prize. I'm not involved with any future or past ones. But I was asked to help them think about the learning prize. And at one point, someone said "would you run it?" And that's how it happened.
Q: If you were to start a lab at Harvard, what lab would you start today here?
NN: I'm not sure there's anything generically harvard, that I would pick because it's Harvard versus some other place. But it's really about the people, and who you are and what you want to do. You have to understand that MIT as an institution, but it's something like 80% research and 20% teaching. That is tilted because of Lincoln Laboratories is a huge center of research. It's a more common phenomenon at MIT and the labs will come and go and start up and it's very entrepreneurial in that sense. The last department we eliminated at MIT was nutrition; it's not a fast changing organization. And I think of Harvard as being different than MIT in that sense, of how much research is done instead of teaching.
Q: I couldn't help but make the analogy between OLPC and things like the Raspberry Pi Foundation; putting together a very cheap machine and making it available to kids. How do you see these other projects in relation to OLPC?
NN: Raspberry Pi is a more techy...almost hobbyist approach to making computing affordable and flexible.
LC: Burn!
NN: They got themselves a little stuck with Linux. As we did too, by the way. But it didn't start from the same point of view. It wasn't trying to anyway be humanitarian. I thought you were headed in a different direction. The most common criticism I got was "Why a laptop when people don't have clean water or reliable food sources?" No one asks Raspberry Pi that. We would ask people if they changed 'laptop' out for 'education' and whether their complaint still worked - it usually didn't.
LC: That's an interesting hypothesis.
DH: I don't think that defuses the question; auto-assuming that laptops are equivalent with other educational spending seems like the ACTUAL criticism that people are making.
NN: Microsoft and Intel went after the project with a certain vengeance.
NN: The people I admire in actual leadership positions … I'll talk about someone I admired who was a good leader. It was Chuck Vest, two presidents ago at MIT. And leadership with him was the person who you came out of a meeting with them walking on air, feeling good about the future directions. They were maybe his directions, but I admired that. People who led in ways you didn't necessarily notice. In hindsight, I hope that it was like that. I watched people like Steve Jobs have tantrums, and it obviously had its good effects, but it was very different. I prefer to be more transparent.
Q: I'm going back to a couple of questions ago, when you were equating technology with education. Can you extrapolate that to a computer taking the place of education in the case of a place like the GSD or the Media Lab?
NN: What I've come to believe recently is that there's a huge difference between education and learning. That education is a little like banking, and learning like economics. Something basic. You can't have a strong economy without banks. But there's something basic about economics and finance that is more fundamental. Education as an institution is very different from learning. For the first years of our life, we do lots of learning without education per se. If you look at countries like Finland, which is getting lots of acclaim recently. There's no testing. There's no homework. Reading doesn't happen until the second grade. And you say "wait a minute, this seems like a vacation." It's the exact opposite of what's happening in a lot of Asian countries or in this country. So I've always thought of technology not as a tool of the institutional side of the equation, but as a tool for learning through play or learning by doing. Technology as a means of expression not as a tool of transference.
You get things like the MOOCs going on now or Khan academy. It's just not part of the equation here. At early ages it's totally separate.
MM: But have you been involved with edX?
NN: When Harvard got involved with MITx I was excited. But as you get down in lower and lower ages and I look at something like that and I say "how could Khan Academy be even remotely celebrated" because almost everything it's doing is wrong. What isn't wrong, what's kind of right is the flipping of the classroom. But the rest of it is just off the wall. That somebody would think they could write all the material? That's like Brittanica starting up in the wake of wikipedia. It doesn't make sense. That you could confuse low production values with simplicity. Or that you could read a book on a subject and then give a course on it. So many things seemed wrong. You don't have to be right for the technology to be right. Especially in the institutional side.
Q: Going from the Media Lab to OLPC, which makes you vulnerable to a critique which has to do with trying to save the world. Even if there are no such intentions, it still has ideas of colonialism. So I wonder if you could talk about that? As architects and others move out of their disciplinary domains, what they should keep in mind?
NN: It was a dramatic change. And there was no ambiguity, I was trying to change the world. That was the mission. Colonialism is a separate issue, we can have that discussion for hours. At the Media Lab, my role was to be a light bulb. My role at OLPC was to be a laser beam. Everything had to do with getting to that dot. I would jokingly tell people that my horizon used to be ten years and now it's ten months. It was very very different. Non profit, supposedly saving the world, but it was totally different behavior. Complete contrast between the two.
The XPRIZE is now between the two. There's lots of energy from people, and you're not trying to focus the laser beam. But it is in a particular area, where we're trying to create momentum.
I will meet people who are 55, 60 years old who have had enormously successful careers in whatever it may be. Banking, business, whatever. You meet them at a cocktail party, what do they talk to you about? They talk to you about their experience in the peace corps. What they remember very often is that for some period in their life they did something like that. And that for the next number of years they did very well, but find themselves looking for meaning again. And having to separate meaning and money is a very unfortunate circumstance.
LC: First world problems! But I admit I totally agree with him.
NN: Today, a lot of young people trade money for meaning. And they will do things are more meaningful than their parents did, and there will be a little more harmony between those. And I think that's terrific.
Q: What about the potential of labs to scale up and replicate in different geographic contexts? I remember there was a period when different 'Media Labs' were operating. One in Europe, one in Asia.
NN: There were five or six of them.
Q: Can you share some thoughts about that period?
NN: What they all had in common was that they were all failures to one degree or another. You'd think you'd learn after the first one, or the second one. But none of them ended particularly well. There's something relatively unique--and not just about the United States and Cambridge and MIT--but there are certain things we take for granted that are very comfortable here. I found myself arguing in those other places for things we took for granted here. It didn't work for one reason or another. I hope we don't try another. But maybe today with the networked society it could work better. But it sure didn't in the past.
Dean Mohsen wraps things up.
MM: It was wonderful to have you talk about your history with such openness and frankness. I do think this area of what research means today is a big conundrum. It's true that the first part of the work was more open-ended; it didn't have an instrumental end. And when you then decided to have your own time, your own lab was highly instrumental. It has research consequences but it's about impact. In a school, we're caught in the tension between the idea of research as something that has this open-endedness, and the idea of impact.
For me, some of the questions people are asking have to do with disciplinary knowledge. I think there's also the belief that this somehow becomes a part of architecture, that it adds to the body of knowledge. I don't think this problem is solved yet. I'm really excited by the way in which some of these ideas relates to the way in which one works and investigates in architecture.
NN: I live three blocks away!
MM: Yes, we will continue this.
Applause. End.
Thank you for reading!
Drew and Lian
The full Architecture Machine Group reunites on November 21st at the new Media Lab for the opening of Futures Past: Design and the Machine. Please join us for further discussions!
That gerbils-robot piece/project from early in his career sounds amazing...
also his point re: tenure is interesting (and maybe has to do with later difference he illuminated between MIT / Harvard in terms of lab / teaching percentage) given recent discussions re: how peer reviewed vs other forms of digital publishing in relation to academic advancement.
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This blog was most active from 2009-2013. Writing about my experiences and life at Harvard GSD started out as a way for me to process my experiences as an M.Arch.I student, and evolved into a record of the intellectual and cultural life of the Cambridge architecture (and to a lesser extent, design/technology) community, through live-blogs. These days, I work as a data storyteller (and blogger at Littldata.com) in San Francisco, and still post here once in a while.


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IV. Work with others to Defuse Regional Conflicts
"We build a world of justice, or we will live in a world of coercion. The magnitude of our shared responsibilities makes our disagreements look so small."
President Bush
Berlin, Germany
May 23, 2002
Concerned nations must remain actively engaged in critical regional disputes to avoid explosive escalation and minimize human suffering. In an increasingly interconnected world, regional crisis can strain our alliances, rekindle rivalries among the major powers, and create horrifying affronts to human dignity.When violence erupts and states falter, the United States will work with friends and partners to alleviate suffering and restore stability.
No doctrine can anticipate every circumstance in which U.S. actiondirect or indirectis warranted.We have finite political, economic, and military resources to meet our global priorities. The United States will approach each case with these strategic principles in mind:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is critical because of the toll of human suffering, because of Americas close relationship with the state of Israel and key Arab states, and because of that regions importance to other global priorities of the United States. There can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides. America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine, living beside Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices. The United States will continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and comprehensive settlement to the conflict.
The United States, the international donor community, and the World Bank stand ready to work with a reformed Palestinian government on economic development, increased humanitarian assistance, and a program to establish, finance, and monitor a truly independent judiciary. If Palestinians embrace democracy, and the rule of law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the creation of a Palestinian state.
Israel also has a large stake in the success of a democratic Palestine. Permanent occupation threatens Israels identity and democracy. So the United States continues to challenge Israeli leaders to take concrete steps to support the emergence of a viable, credible Palestinian state. As there is progress towards security, Israel forces need to withdraw fully to positions they held prior to September 28, 2000. And consistent with the recommendations of the Mitchell Committee, Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop. As violence subsides, freedom of movement should be restored, permitting innocent Palestinians to resume work and normal life. The United States can play a crucial role but, ultimately, lasting peace can only come when Israelis and Palestinians resolve the issues and end the conflict between them.
In South Asia, the United States has also emphasized the need for India and Pakistan to resolve their disputes. This Administration invested time and resources building strong bilateral relations with India and Pakistan. These strong relations then gave us leverage to play a constructive role when tensions in the region became acute.With Pakistan, our bilateral relations have been bolstered by Pakistans choice to join the war against terror and move toward building a more open and tolerant society. The Administration sees Indias potential to become one of the great democratic powers of the twentyfirst century and has worked hard to transform our relationship accordingly. Our involvement in this regional dispute, building on earlier investments in bilateral relations, looks first to concrete steps by India and Pakistan that can help defuse military confrontation.
Indonesia took courageous steps to create a working democracy and respect for the rule of law. By tolerating ethnic minorities, respecting the rule of law, and accepting open markets, Indonesia may be able to employ the engine of opportunity that has helped lift some of its neighbors out of poverty and desperation. It is the initiative by Indonesia that allows U.S. assistance to make a difference.
In the Western Hemisphere we have formed flexible coalitions with countries that share our priorities, particularly Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and Colombia. Together we will promote a truly democratic hemisphere where our integration advances security, prosperity, opportunity, and hope.We will work with regional institutions, such as the Summit of the Americas process, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Defense Ministerial of the Americas for the benefit of the entire hemisphere.
Parts of Latin America confront regional conflict, especially arising from the violence of drug cartels and their accomplices. This conflict and unrestrained narcotics trafficking could imperil the health and security of the United States. Therefore we have developed an active strategy to help the Andean nations adjust their economies, enforce their laws, defeat terrorist organizations, and cut off the supply of drugs, whileas importantwe work to reduce the demand for drugs in our own country.
In Colombia, we recognize the link between terrorist and extremist groups that challenge the security of the state and drug trafficking activities that help finance the operations of such groups. We are working to help Colombia defend its democratic institutions and defeat illegal armed groups of both the left and right by extending effective sovereignty over the entire national territory and provide basic security to the Colombian people.
In Africa, promise and opportunity sit side by side with disease, war, and desperate poverty. This threatens both a core value of the United States preserving human dignityand our strategic prioritycombating global terror. American interests and American principles, therefore, lead in the same direction: we will work with others for an African continent that lives in liberty, peace, and growing prosperity. Together with our European allies, we must help strengthen Africas fragile states, help build indigenous capability to secure porous borders, and help build up the law enforcement and intelligence infrastructure to deny havens for terrorists.
An ever more lethal environment exists in Africa as local civil wars spread beyond borders to create regional war zones. Forming coalitions of the willing and cooperative security arrangements are key to confronting these emerging transnational threats.
Africas great size and diversity requires a security strategy that focuses on bilateral engagement and builds coalitions of the willing. This Administration will focus on three interlocking strategies for the region:
Ultimately the path of political and economic freedom presents the surest route to progress in sub-Saharan Africa, where most wars are conflicts over material resources and political access often tragically waged on the basis of ethnic and religious difference. The transition to the African Union with its stated commitment to good governance and a common responsibility for democratic political systems offers opportunities to strengthen democracy on the continent.


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I've been making these meatballs for so long I cannot remember when the first time was – they're one of my husband's favorites (and he doesn't have that many favorite dishes). They're delicious with both pasta and rice, but lately Joao's been eating them in sandwich form – very Joey Tribbiani. :)
Adapted from one of Jamie's recipes, found on this blog.
Meatballs – Jamie's and mine
adapted from The Naked Chef
500g ground beef
2 teaspoons dried oregano
a couple of splashes of Tabasco
1 teaspoon table salt
freshly ground black pepper, to taste (I use a lot)
½ teaspoon garlic infused olive oil (or use regular olive oil + 1 garlic clove, minced)
1 large egg
1/3 cup homemade breadcrumbs + about 1/3 cup extra to roll the meatballs
½ large onion, processed*
generous handful of flat leaf parsley leaves, finely chopped
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F. Line a large baking sheet with a double layer of foil. Brush the foil with vegetable oil.
Place the beef, dried oregano, Tabasco, salt, black pepper, olive oil (and garlic, if using), egg, 1/3 cup breadcrumbs , onion and parsley in a large bowl and mix to combine (I prefer to use my hand to do that). Try to shape some of the mixture into a ball – if too wet, add 1 tablespoon breadcrumbs and mix again. Grab 1 ½ tablespoons of the mixture and shape into compact balls (the job becomes easier if you lightly wet the palms of your hands). Roll the meatballs in the extra breadcrumbs. Place the meatballs onto the prepared sheet and bake until firm and cooked through (about 40 minutes).
Serve with tomato sauce.
* I've tried this recipe with chopped, processed and grated onions and to me the best way of using them is processed – chopped with a knife the onion pieces are too large (which makes rolling the meatballs more difficult) and grated the onion becomes too wet
Makes about 25
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Meatballs – Jamie's and mine
9 comments:
- Alex Radhose said...
I've never tried to add oregano. Don't know why. Mincemeat and oregano mix is so obvious :)
- October 19, 2011
- Priya Suresh said...
Flavourful meat balls..
- October 19, 2011
- Ali said...
yummy, never tried with sandwich though :) i love mine served with rice. Nice photo :)
- October 19, 2011
- thingsforboys said...
Love your skillet! I have the set too. These sounds great. Meatballs are so delicious!
- October 19, 2011
- kankana said...
I really like how crisp and clear ur photo looks and that skillet is so gorgeous. I love meatballs any time.
- October 20, 2011
- The Cook said...
Whoa, hello. Details on the skillet please!
- October 20, 2011
- argone said...
I love meatballs with pasta ... Nigella's are cool too !
- October 20, 2011
- Michelle said...
I'm so hungry after looking at your blog!
- October 21, 2011
- Lynda @ TasteFood said...
This is lovely for a weeknight. Nice photo!
- October 21, 2011
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Injected Bacteria Shrink Tumors in Rats, Dogs and Humans - 08/13/2014
Injected Bacteria Shrink Tumors in Rats, Dogs and Humans
Release Date: August 13, 2014
Gram stain of C. novyi-NT germination in a dog tumor. The darker rod-shaped bacteria are visible throughout the image.
Credit: David L. Huso and Baktiar Karim of the Johns Hopkins Department of Pathology.
A modified version of the Clostridium novyi (C. novyi-NT) bacterium can produce a strong and precisely targeted anti-tumor response in rats, dogs and now humans, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers.
In its natural form, C. novyi is found in the soil and, in certain cases, can cause tissue-damaging infection in cattle, sheep and humans. The microbe thrives only in oxygen-poor environments, which makes it a targeted means of destroying oxygen-starved cells in tumors that are difficult to treat with chemotherapy and radiation. The Johns Hopkins team removed one of the bacteria's toxin-producing genes to make it safer for therapeutic use.
For the study, the researchers tested direct-tumor injection of the C. novyi-NT spores in 16 pet dogs that were being treated for naturally occurring tumors. Six of the dogs had an anti-tumor response 21 days after their first treatment. Three of the six showed complete eradication of their tumors, and the length of the longest diameter of the tumor shrunk by at least 30 percent in the three other dogs.
Most of the dogs experienced side effects typical of a bacterial infection, such as fever and tumor abscesses and inflammation, according to a report on the work published online Aug. 13 in Science Translational Medicine.
In a Phase I clinical trial of C. novyi-NT spores conducted at MD Anderson Cancer Center, a patient with an advanced soft tissue tumor in the abdomen received the spore injection directly into a metastatic tumor in her arm. The treatment significantly reduced the tumor in and around the bone. "She had a very vigorous inflammatory response and abscess formation," according to Nicholas Roberts, Vet.M.B., Ph.D. "But at the moment, we haven't treated enough people to be sure if the spectrum of responses that we see in dogs will truly recapitulate what we see in people."
"One advantage of using bacteria to treat cancer is that you can modify these bacteria relatively easily, to equip them with other therapeutic agents, or make them less toxic as we have done here, " said Shibin Zhou, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of oncology at the Cancer Center. Zhou is also the director of experimental therapeutics at the Kimmel Cancer Center's Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics. He and colleagues at Johns Hopkins began exploring C. novyi's cancer-fighting potential more than a decade ago after studying hundred-year old accounts of an early immunotherapy called Coley toxins, which grew out of the observation that some cancer patients who contracted serious bacterial infections showed cancer remission.
The researchers focused on soft tissue tumors because "these tumors are often locally advanced, and they have spread into normal tissue," said Roberts, a Ludwig Center and Department of Pathology researcher. The bacteria cannot germinate in normal tissues and will only attack the oxygen-starved or hypoxic cells in the tumor and spare healthy tissue around the cancer.
Verena Staedtke, M.D., Ph.D., a Johns Hopkins neuro-oncology fellow, first tested the spore injection in rats with implanted brain tumors called gliomas. Microscopic evaluation of the tumors showed that the treatment killed tumor cells but spared healthy cells just a few micrometers away. The treatment also prolonged the rats' survival, with treated rats surviving an average of 33 days after the tumor was implanted, compared with an average of 18 days in rats that did not receive the C. noyvi-NT spore injection.
The researchers then extended their tests of the injection to dogs. "One of the reasons that we treated dogs with C. novyi-NT before people is because dogs can be a good guide to what may happen in people," Roberts said. The dog tumors share many genetic similarities with human tumors, he explained, and their tumors appeared spontaneously as they would in humans. Dogs are also treated with many of the same cancer drugs as humans and respond similarly.
The dogs showed a variety of anti-tumor responses and inflammatory side effects.
Zhou said that study of the C. novyi-NT spore injection in humans is ongoing, but the final results of their treatment are not yet available. "We expect that some patients will have a stronger response than others, but that's true of other therapies as well. Now, we want to know how well the patients can tolerate this kind of therapy."
It may be possible to combine traditional treatments like chemotherapy with the C. novyi-NT therapy, said Zhou, who added that the researchers have already studied these combinations in mice.
"Some of these traditional therapies are able to increase the hypoxic region in a tumor and would make the bacterial infection more potent and increase its anti-tumor efficiency," Staedtke suggested. "C. novyi-NT is an agent that could be combined with a multitude of chemotherapy agents or radiation."
"Another good thing about using bacteria as a therapeutic agent is that once they're infecting the tumor, they can induce a strong immune response against tumor cells themselves," Zhou said.
Previous studies in mice, he noted, suggest that C. novyi-NT may help create a lingering immune response that fights metastatic tumors long after the initial bacterial treatment, but this effect remains to be seen in the dog and human studies.
Other researchers on the study include Yuan Qiao, Luis A. Diaz Jr., Nickolas Papadopoulos, Kenneth W. Kinzler, Bert Vogelstein and Chetan Bettegowda of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center's Ludwig Center; Linping Zhan, Amanda Collins, David Tung, Maria Miller, Jeffrey Roix, Halle H. Zhang, Mary Varterasian and Saurabh Saha of BioMed Valley Discoveries Inc.; Filip Janku, Thorunn Helgason, Ravi Murthy, Robert S. Benjamin, Ariel D. Szvalb, Justin E. Bird and Sinchita Roy-Chowdhuri of the MD Anderson Cancer Center; Ren-Yuan Bai and Gregory J. Riggins of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Department of Neurosurgery; Anthony W. Rusk and Kristen V. Khanna of Animal Clinical Investigation, LLC; Baktiar Karim and David L. Huso of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Department of Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology; Jennifer McDaniel and Gerald Post of The Veterinary Cancer Center; Amanda Elpiner of VCA Great Lakes Veterinary Specialists; Alexandra Sahora of The Oncology Service, Friendship Hospital for Animals; Joshua Lachowicz of BluePearl Veterinary Partners; Brenda Phillips of Veterinary Specialty Hospital of San Diego; Avenelle Turner of Veterinary Cancer Group of Los Angeles at City of Angels Veterinary Specialty Center; and Mary K. Klein of Southern Arizona Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center.
Funding for the study was provided by BioMed Valley Discoveries Inc., the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research, the Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund, the Commonwealth Fund, Swim Across America, the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists, Voices Against Brain Cancer, the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, the Johns Hopkins Clinician Scientist Award, and the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (CA129825 and CA062924) and National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (R25NS065729).
Under a licensing agreement between BioMed Valley Discoveries Inc. and the Johns Hopkins University, Luis A. Diaz Jr., Kenneth W. Kinzler, Bert Vogelstein, Chetan Bettegowda and Shibin Zhou are entitled to a share of royalties received by the university on sales of products described in this article. Their participation as co-authors did not include data analysis or interpretation of the clinical results described herein. Kinzler, Vogelstein, Bettegowda and Zhou hold patents for work related to this study.
Related News Release: Germ Chemo Combo Fights Cancer
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Vanessa Wasta
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Photo/video files to accompany this story are available for download.
We are providing this photo/video with the understanding that it will be used only to help illustrate the story in the corresponding news release. Please also find appropriate credit information with the files. If there is anything else you need, please email us at [email protected]. Thank you.


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Keeper Of The Grove 3
Play Keeper Of The Grove 3 and many more free online games similar to Keeper Of The Grove 3. Our online games portal let you play all the games like Keeper Of The Grove 3. In this fun strategy game you will be the Keeper of the grove and your job is to make sure that the enemy creeps will not get away with stealing the precious gems you are guarding. Build defensive turrets around the path so they will automatically defend the map so nothing will get stolen. Also you should try to upgrade them in order to become more efficient in combat. You can call a wave earlier in order to receive a bonus for that. Collect all the coins with your mouse and build more defensive turrets.


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PressReader / Dudley Clarke
Bill Fraser.
One of the key officers in the early SAS was Bill Fraser, a homosexual.
One of the founders of the SAS was Paddy Mayne, who had a serious alcohol problem and who was 'probably gay'.
A cowboy, a one-eyed boxer and a parachuting priest.
Robert Blair 'Paddy' Mayne, a militant Ulster unionist, had 'volcanic bouts of brutality - perhaps a by-product of furiously repressed homosexuality'.
SAS: Rogue Heroes
David Stirling.
Reg Seekings
Reg Seekings, an early top man in the SAS, killed an injured young boy.
A cowboy, a one-eyed boxer and a parachuting priest.
The SAS
Does the UK have an army of sadistic homosexual child rapists? / UK MILITARY / Most Military Leaders are Sadistic Gays? / NAZIS
Randolph Churchill
Randolph Churchill was an early member of the SAS.
"Randolph Churchill's behavior displayed signs of bipolar disorder.
Winston Churchill's Brilliant But Troubled Son, Randolph
Jock Lewes
Jock Lewes, the SAS co-founder, was a Nazi sympathiser.
The first SAS operation, in 1941, was a disaster.
Of the 56 who parachuted into the desert in the midst of a storm, only 21 came back.
"Some died on landing, while others, unable to unclip their parachutes in the gale, were scraped to death along the jagged desert floor.
"Several were too badly injured to walk and were left to die of thirst."
A cowboy, a one-eyed boxer and a parachuting priest.
In 1943, the leader of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, was captured and sent to Colditz.
A cowboy, a one-eyed boxer and a parachuting priest.
The SAS has been linked to the death of biological weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003
The SAS .
David Stirling, set up an organisation called Greater Britain 1975 (GB75), whose members included a Jersey-based arms dealer.
Stirling was described by his biographer as "well to the right of the Conservative Party"
Greater Britain 1975 was said to have planned to topple the government.
The SAS .
Ampleforth College, where David Stirling was educated.
"He was impertinent, indolent and often half asleep after nights spent drinking, gambling and playing billiards in smart London clubs.
"The hospital nurses knew him well, for he frequently popped in during the morning, whey-faced and liverish, to request a blast from the oxygen bottle to cure his hangover.
"Since being posted to Egypt with the British Commandos, he had spent much of his time in Cairo's bars and clubs, or gambling at the racecourse...
"Senior commanders thought him incompetent and profoundly irritating. A cowboy of a soldier, he was under investigation for malingering."
(Left) Colonel Sir Archibald David Stirling who founded the SAS. (Right) Stirling's cousin, the boy-loving Gavin Maxwell. The Stirlings, the Frasers (Lovat) and the Maxwells are all related. Website for this image
"In a short life, the aristocratic David Stirling had tried and failed at being an artist, architect, cowboy and mountaineer...
"His mother was the daughter of Lord Lovat, the chief of Clan Fraser, and his father a distinguished general, an MP and master of a 15,000-acre estate...
"He was sent down from Cambridge after misbehaving on a lavish scale and spending more time at Newmarket racecourse than on his studies.
"Stirling went to Paris to become an artist... but displayed little talent for painting.
"The same went for architecture, his next choice of profession, as well as his ambition to be the first person to climb Mount Everest, even though he suffered from vertigo...
"He relaxed only among men...
"His boisterous exterior belied a lonely man prone to periodic depressions and inner turmoil..."
"The first SAS operation in November 1941, code-named Squatter, ought never to have taken place, given that 30-knot winds were predicted - twice the maximum speed for safe parachuting.
"But Stirling himself took the decision to go anyway...
"Operation Squatter had been an unmitigated disaster.
"Of the 55 men who had parachuted into the gale on November 16, 1941, just 21 had returned. The rest were dead or injured, missing or captured.
"What was really devastating was that the SAS had lost most of its strength without firing a shot, attacking the enemy or detonating a single bomb.
SAS: Rogue Heroes - The Authorised Wartime History by Ben Macintyre / dailymail
The SAS helped the Khmer Rouge.
How the SAS gave Pol Pot a hand - New Statesman.
"Every account of the British army and the SAS in particular will not mention the torture mass rape and pillage in Kenya which included roasting people alive over open fires.
"Also missing will be accurate accounts of the terror used to deny democracy and support slavery in Aden."
SAS commander Blair Mayne's reputation
Labels: Bill Fraser, DAVID KELLY, David Stirling, Diana, Dudley Clarke, gay, GB75, Iran-Contra, Jock Lewes, Khmer Rouge, Paddy Mayne, Randolph, SAS, Seekings, Squatter, Yvonne Fletcher


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Crayfish new Giant Species
New 'Giant' Species Of Crayfish Found In Tennessee Creek
January 20, 2011
Barbicambarus simmonsi. The newly discovered, quite large, crayfish.
Barbicambarus simmonsi. The newly discovered, quite large, crayfish.
"A new species of giant crayfish [has] literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places," Reuters reports.
Researchers Christopher Taylor and Guenter Schuster reveal the discovery in the latest issue of the Proceeding of the Biological Society of Washington (it costs $10 to buy the article). The Barbicambarus simmonsi is about 5 inches long — double the length of most crayfish in the region.
Taylor, from the University of Illinois, and Schuster, from Eastern Kentucky University, heard in the summer of 2009 about the possibility that a new species had been spotted in southern Tennessee by a scientist with the Tennessee Valley Authority. They headed to the area in October that year. And they almost didn't come up with anything.
The University of Illinois news bureau writes that:
"With two other biologists, Taylor and Schuster scoured the creek for more specimens. After two hours of turning over boulders and kicking up the sediment to flush the crayfish into their seine, the researchers had found nothing out of the ordinary.
" 'We had worked so hard and long that we were ready to give up and find another site,' Schuster said. 'And we saw this big flat boulder underneath a bridge and so we said, OK. Let's flip this rock, just for the heck of it; this will be our last one. And sure enough, that's where we got the first specimen.' It was a big male, about twice the size of any other crayfish they had seen that day."
Taylor told us today that "we were elated, jumping for joy," when the first of the two crayfish they ended up finding that day crawled out. The scientists proved that they had something new with DNA tests and after studying a ridge and unique spine between the creatures' eyes that the other species in the genus do not have.
Most North American crayfish, he adds, live no more than three or four years and occasionally grow to 4 or 4 1/2 inches long (from the tip of the body to the tip of the tail). The two discovered in 2009, he estimates, were 4 to 5 years old and could be part of the largest species of crayfish in North America.
Taylor and Schuster have each discovered other new species of creatures before, but this one, says Taylor, is special because it wasn't found "in a very difficult-to-access habitat like a cave. ... This was a stream and region that had been searched."
And the attention he and Schuster have gotten in the past 24 hours, says Taylor, "has been wild."
Barbicambarus simmonsi, by the way, gets its name from TVA scientist Jeffrey Simmons — the guy who spotted what turned out to be the new species.
The new species, Barbicambarus simmonsi is more than twice the size of typical crayfish found in the same creek.
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FAQs: Multichannel marketing for small businesses
From remote work to food delivery and curbside pickup at restaurants, from digital entertainment to on-demand health and wellness services, the COVID-19 pandemic forced even avowed fans of brick-and-mortar businesses to adjust to virtual interaction with the businesses they patronize. And even as things slowly return to (sort of) normal, this touchless way of doing business doesn't appear to be going away.
If your customers and potential leads have scattered off to the cyberwinds in the past year, how do you find more? The key is to be where they are—and that's where multichannel marketing (also known as omnichannel or cross-channel marketing) can come in.
If you've never heard of multichannel marketing… and even the idea sends you into a tizzy because you already have your hands full with one-channel marketing, don't panic: You may already be doing it without realizing it.
The following FAQs offer the basics for taking your marketing to the next level.
Q: What is multichannel marketing?
A: Multichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that works on the theory that customers are more likely to buy when they can use their favorite channel. It's all about the choices both existing and potential customers have to communicate with your brand—and it makes it easy for them to switch between channels if they choose to do so. Those channels can include:
A brick-and-mortar store/office
Your website's e-commerce store
Phone ordering
An email newsletter
Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn)
Google My Business and/or Google Ads
Q: What's so great about multichannel marketing?
A: You'll reach more customers on the channels where they're most likely to make a purchase. Grandma Sue might never look for deals on Facebook, but she'll order from a paper catalog in a heartbeat. Granddaughter Sara, on the other hand, haunts Instagram daily, looking for the latest products endorsed by her favorite influencers. You'll also be able to get customer feedback that allows you to make more informed decisions about your products and services and proactively fix issues.
Q: Okay, I have those channels. That means I don't have to do anything else, right?
A: Not exactly. If you're active in any or all of these channels, you've taken the first step. However, for effective multichannel marketing, you'll need to tailor your marketing content to and speak the language of the audience in each channel.
Q: Uh…speak the language?
A: Social media followers tend to fall into different personality types, depending on the platform(s). It's possible that not all of these channels are right for your business, but if you keep these brief profiles in mind, you'll be able to speak the right language for the audiences on the platforms you do use.
Facebook is the place for news, updates, interaction and connection. It's how family and friends stay in touch with each other, so you may find a real diversity of ages and backgrounds among your followers. Warmth, personality and humanity will go a long way toward building a connection here.
Instagram is the place to see and be seen. It's all about the visual: carefully curated photos and other content. Followers tend to skew younger here, so work with visuals in mind and offer a casual, friendly and honest tone.
Twitter is the place for fast-breaking, to-the-point news. Like Facebook, you'll find diversity here, but you'll also find a group that isn't shy about letting businesses know when they're happy or unhappy—and those tweets may be shared ad infinitum. Keep it short and snappy…and pay attention to the replies.
LinkedIn is the place for businesspeople. Every company should have a LinkedIn profile; it's where followers "meet" your business and get an idea of your products and services. Keep posts professional and share interesting content about your company or industry in general.
Google My Business and Google Ads will reach a broader, more diverse audience. This is where many prospects will meet you for the first time so try extra hard to put your best foot forward here. It may be the place to include great reviews to highlight your professionalism, sincerity and credibility.
Q: What about emails, newsletters or snail mail? Should I bother?
A: Yes! Email and newsletters are a good way to keep in touch with your audience. People are hungry for readable, credible and informational content. And given the screen fatigue so prevalent these days, snail mail is having its moment in the sun again. A fun and intriguing postcard or catalog offers a nice change of pace.
Q: Do I need to do a different campaign in each channel?
A: If you have the time and energy, go for it. But you can also take one great idea and use it between all channels, adjusting the voice and look to match the audience. For example, a newsletter can reward loyal customers with a discount coupon while a video on Instagram offers followers an exclusive sale preview.
Wrapping it up…
This article only scratches the surface of multichannel marketing, but it offers a good roadmap to get you moving. And you can start slow. For example, if you know your potential customers aren't on Instagram, skip it and focus on the channels where you know prospects are.
Experiment with different aspects of a campaign—colors, images, copy, calls to action—to see what works within the different channels. Don't be afraid to try new things as you create marketing ideas that allow all of your channels to work together. Above all, allow yourself to have fun building a marketing strategy to bolster your business.
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Phoenix, AZ 85032
Mon - Wed: 9am - 6pm
Thurs & Fri: 9am - 5pm
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- How Smoking Can Contribute to Vision Loss: Unveiling the Hidden Risks
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- This Winter, Don't Let Dry Eyes Get the Best of You: A Comprehensive Guide
- Simple Habits for Preventing Dry Eyes at Work: A Comprehensive Guide
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- Smoking Versus Eye Health: Unveiling the Impact on Vision
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